The Police confirmed to the BBC that it had been hit by a distributed denial of service attack.

It said: “Soca has chosen to take its website offline to limit the impact of DDoS attack on other clients hosted by our service provider.

“The Soca website is a source of information for the general public which is hosted by an external provider. It is not linked to our operational material or the data we hold.” Soca is of course in good company – LulzSec has taken down the FBI,the CIA as well as various gaming companies. ®